


A Serious Man

by doctorcolubra



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: Family Feels, Gen, Headcanon, I guess this is sort of an AU, Jewish Identity, Purim, Richard's lesbian moms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-25 08:10:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13830054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorcolubra/pseuds/doctorcolubra
Summary: In keeping with the anarchic spirit of the holiday, Purim Torah is a form of rabbinical comedy, involving an ironic, absurdist, or parodic examination of a position that no one seriously holds.  You argue something which is at best a stretch, if not completely outlandish.  Because it’s fun to argue, is why.  If you can make something very silly sound plausible, you win.  Typical topics are “was Jacob’s brother Esau actually a vampire?” or “are there aliens in the Tanakh?”Or what if Jared’s not Jewish, but Richard is?





	A Serious Man

_Ah. You are Jew. Jew with a business._

Richard is so taken aback that he stammers something about being Episcopalian, because it’s the WASPiest thing that comes to mind, but when Nastya repeats it, he can only bite his lip and give a twitchy nod. It’s stupid to lie. She clocked him. He’s not ashamed, he’s just…nonplussed, maybe.

 

His father is a Jew with a business too.

Richard’s father owns a motel in Verdigris, just outside of Tulsa. The Golden Lodge Motor Inn, standing by the highway in the middle of nowhere between a McDonald’s and a barbecue joint. In the evenings the smell of fryer grease floats on the air. There’s land for sale on the other side of the highway, an undecided mass of bush, with tangles of saplings and suckers almost obscuring the realtors’ signs. Richard is sixteen and his father puts him to work at the motel in summers, skimming bugs from the pool and taking out the trash after breakfast hours are over. The hallways smell of ozone and old carpets heated up by the passage of the vacuum cleaner, a whiff of Glade here and there. He’s supposed to knock on the doors if he smells cigarette smoke, tell the guests to cut it out. The thought makes him want to die, so he never does it.

 

Richard’s birthday falls on Tisha B’Av, so his bar mitzvah sucks. He faints right on the bima, in fact, gone like a blown fuse, overheated in his polyester suit and wool tallit. No air conditioning at B’nai Emuna in the mid-90s. The heat in Tulsa is dry and shriveling, as if the city’s under a magnifying glass. Richard wakes up in a corner of the sanctuary, his feet propped up on a box and his tie loosened, Dr. Fishman sitting with him.

His father looms behind the doctor, freaking out in true Hendricks style. “It’s fine, it’s fine, would somebody get him some water, please? Should we take him to the ER? Is that too much? Should he not have been fasting?”

“Well, he shouldn’t fast _now_ ,” says Dr. Fishman mildly. “Take him out for awhile to get some quiet and something to eat, some water, come back when his colour’s better. He doesn’t have to miss the whole day. — _Yasher koach_ , Richard,” he adds. “You were reading well.”

For a minute. “Thank you.”

 

In the last week of August, he packs up his stuff in his crappy second-hand Samsonite with the broken handle, and flies from Tulsa to Sault Ste. Marie. He has to go through customs on the Canadian side just to cross the river to Michigan again when he gets out of the airport, his mom and Linda driving him home in their minivan while he dozes in the back. There’s a kitschy blue glass hamsa dangling from the rearview mirror with the Tefilat ha-Derech inscribed on the back, and Linda keeps a St. Christopher medal up there too, because it’s not a lie that Richard has Episcopalian family.

 

Richard has his father’s hair and his eyes, at least the set of them, big and cartoonish. His father has olive skin that looks greenish under fluorescent lights, and Richard didn’t get that. He has his mother’s gingery colouring, her blue eyes, and up in the Sault, that’s a disappointment.

“You’re Jewish?” says the girl who just moved in next door. “You don’t look—I guess you do,” she says, looking at his nose. 

They’re both thirteen. Richard was shocked a few months ago to see a photo of him taken from the side: it’s not the usual angle he sees in the mirror every day, and unobserved, his face has been changing from the ordinary pudge of childhood. A bony, prominent nose and a long jaw, his father’s features emerging from his face.

She thinks it’s exotic, anyway. She goes to a church that sounds like it’s kind of preoccupied with Jews. She asks him a lot of questions that he doesn’t have answers to, like how to say the Lord’s Prayer in Hebrew, or whether he’d ever move to Israel.

“Did anyone in your family die in the Holocaust?”

“Jesus Christ, Bonnie.”

“I’m just curious. I like history.”

 _It’s not history and it’s none of your business,_ he thinks, but he doesn’t say it. In the Tulsa summers he can hang out with Bighead, but up in the Sault he doesn’t really have friends. Not people he likes, or people who like him. The second part is actually the bigger hurdle. Mutual toleration is the best he can do, so he tolerates.

“No,” he says instead. “None of us died in the Holocaust, okay? Can we talk about something else?”

 

Richard’s great-aunt Fenja is the one who’s the savant about family history. It’s dangerous to ask her any questions, because she’ll park you in front of her photo albums and cardboard file-boxes for hours. But Richard does know the short version.

Hendricks is a Dutch name; apparently it used to be Henriquez, when the family were driven out of Toledo in 1492. They settled in Amsterdam, then came to the New World with the Dutch West India Company, where they landed in Curaçao. His mother’s family, the Grades, escaped from Riga to Curaçao in 1940 by exploiting a visa loophole. They left the island a decade later for America; Tulsa was at its prettiest back then, full of oil money. 

There are pictures of Richard’s grandfather in Fenja’s box—he’s squinting in the sun with Richard’s eyes, looking a little vacant like his mind’s somewhere else, on a beautiful street in Willemstad full of pale houses with white trim. The houses are each brightly coloured, something the old photo can’t show: blue, yellow, pink, and turquoise.

Richard was named after him. In Hebrew it’s Reuven.

 

After the divorce, Mom lives with Linda up in the Sault. They’re old college friends, rekindling a romance after decades. Linda’s a veterinarian who wears a lot of flannel and Kodiaks, and she tells Richard that there’s nothing wrong with loving the things you love, even if that makes you come off like a stereotype. “Because the thing is that you aren’t one,” she says. “You’re not some cardboard character. You’re you.”

There’s one synagogue here and it’s across the river on the Canadian side. Sometimes they can barely make minyan. Things like matzoh have to come in big orders from Toronto, candles are never the right size, and you can never find a pomegranate in the stores for Rosh Hashanah.

Mom’s across the river tonight at Kabbalat Shabbat, and Linda’s getting dinner ready; there’s no time to lose when sunset’s this early. Mom’s a little iffy on the existence of God, but she likes the structure that Shabbat gives to the week: the candles, wine at dinner, chicken in a golden spicy sauce, the gross pickled herring that Dad used to like and which lingers on the table for memory’s sake. She forcibly unplugs Richard from all his tech, and they talk about books at dinner instead.

Richard is seventeen and he doesn’t believe in God either. He hasn’t for a long time, but he’s just been reading Daniel Dennett and it’s exciting to give himself a label, to feel his mind shaping itself to new opinions. 

He’s taking his bike out in the new winter darkness, the LEDs flickering fore and aft. It’s late November on a Friday night, just after school. With the sun gone down, the air is gas-jet blue, and the snow in the woods hasn’t quite reached the ground. There’s a thin icing-sugar dusting over the matted dead leaves, along the windward sides of the tree trunks. The ground is muddy, deep puddles across the path topped with thin shells of ice the colour of café-au-lait. 

In Tulsa, this kind of emptiness creeps him out. In the Sault, it’s wilderness. It feels like you could ride just another fifteen minutes and fall off the edge of the earth, into the kind of nothingness where the weather report’s in degrees Kelvin, and somehow Richard loves that. In that winter darkness, that silence, he knows he could think thoughts nobody ever had before. 

But he doesn’t ride another fifteen minutes. He turns back for the lights of home.

**Author's Note:**

> Glossary:
> 
> Tisha B'Av: a miserable fast day that falls in high summer, July or August, commemorating the destruction of the Temple and various other calamities.
> 
> Bima: the raised platform where the rabbi and readers stand in a synagogue.
> 
> Yasher koach: a "congrats/good job" phrase used most often in religious contexts.
> 
> Hamsa: [this thing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamsa), an amulet for luck and protection
> 
> Tefilat ha-Derech: prayer for travellers
> 
> Minyan: the quorum of ten Jews necessary for services
> 
> Kabbalat Shabbat: the Friday night service that inaugurates Shabbat


End file.
